


Don't Know Where, Don't Know When...

by josephina_x



Series: Dimension 46’\-A [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Gen, One Year Later, Post-Series, Post-Weirdmageddon, See You Next Summer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 04:23:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12573628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: People are jerks who think it’s funny to troll for triangles in real life, and Ford may have gone a little bit overboard this time. ...Well, Stan hopes so, anyway. Sort of.





	Don't Know Where, Don't Know When...

**Author's Note:**

> Fic: Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When...  
> Fandom: Gravity Falls  
> Pairing: n/a  
> Rating: PG-13  
> Spoilers: through the end of the series, and some of the books (Journal #3)  
> Characters: Stanley “Stanford” Pines, Stanford Pines | The Author, Dipper Pines, Mabel Pines, Soos Ramirez, Other Gravity Falls Characters  
> Summary: People are jerks who think it’s funny to troll for triangles in real life, and Ford may have gone a little bit overboard this time. ...Well, Stan hopes so, anyway. Sort of.  
> Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit.  
> AN: Oh, I know I shouldn’t be writing this. I mainlined Gravity Falls in something like 2.5 days, all-at-once, well after the show had ended, and I -know- I’m still not getting the character voices right because of that. (And yes, I know the only way I’m gonna be able to “fix” that problem is to rewatch it again all-the-way-through at a rate of only one-per-day or something ...not that I have that much willpower or anything, to only rewatch _one_ episode each day. Sigh.)

“Aw, geez…” Stan sighed, as Ford came out of the woods at an almighty tear, the kids all but dragged along in his wake, with _something_ large draped over his shoulder. From the look of things, today wasn’t going to be a ‘relax-out-on-the-front-porch-of-the-Mystery-Shack-all-day day’ after all. _It figures_ , he thought, as he set down his soda can and stood up from the couch. He watched Ford leap up onto the porch next to him and only then come to a halt.

“Ford?” Stan asked, wondering “What the heck is going on?” But with the anxiety rolling off of his brother and the sci-fi gun he had in-hand… well, he could probably already guess. And it didn’t look good. “What’s--”

“--It’s Bill!” his brother yelled out at him hoarsely, gesturing about with the gun. He’d barely stopped for breath, and looked ready to start raving in classic angry geek fashion about the dumb triangle. “He’s back, and--” from experience, Stan knew Ford would be working himself up into a full-blown anxious fit, if he didn’t distract him quick.

“--Woah, woah, just calm down, Ford!” Stan tried, but all that got him was a glare and… wait, was that thing slung over Ford’s shoulder a teenager? One he didn’t recognize? Who from the looks of things had been violently knocked unconscious and tied up nearly within an inch of his life? “Uh, Sixer…”

“I said _Bill’s back_ , Stan,” Ford repeated, giving him an angry, almost-exasperated look, “ _Obviously._ ” He unceremoniously dropped the teen like a sack of potatoes on the porch. Stan didn’t even have time to wince before Ford practically shoved the gun into his hands. “--Here! Take this and keep a close eye on him!” Ford demanded, glaring down at the teenager, “If he tries anything, shoot him!” That said, he turned to the kids with a more focused, decisive look on his face. “--Dipper, Mabel, we don’t have much time! We need to get the rest of the Zodiac back together, in order to banish Bill for good! I’ll retrieve the supplies we need for the circle, and find Soos. I’ll leave it to you two to gather the others.” Then the big idiot all but stormed the Shack, leaving Stan with an unconscious teenager with a head wound bleeding out onto his nice wood porch to deal with. Joy.

...along with two worried but determined-looking thirteen-year-olds who were glancing at each other and doing the twin telepathy thing.

“So… phone tag?” Stan prompted, looking at the two of them. Seemed obvious enough to him; driving into town to go knocking on doors seemed a bit unnecessary.

Dipper hadn’t taken but two seconds of looking back-and-forth between Stan’s frown and Ford’s disappearing back before nervously stammering out to his sister, “I’ll call Pacifica and Wendy if you talk to Fiddleford and the others.”

Mabel got that growing _smile_ she got when she was about to tease her brother over his still-a-crush on Wendy -- no, it hadn’t gone away over the past year away from Gravity Falls, as it turned out -- but then she looked down at the teen on the porch and... didn’t. Instead, she seemed to get serious. “I’ll handle Gideon and Robbie, Grunkle Ford can talk to Fiddleford, and then we can both help him look for Soos,” she said decisively before marching up onto the porch.

“Okay,” Dipper agreed, and Mabel paused for a moment as her brother raced past her into the Shack first.

Stan didn’t have the heart to do anything but let the kids do what they felt they needed to do -- but he couldn’t help but notice that Mabel looked annoyed and torn and worried in equal measure just then. ...Probably because her grappling hook was what was being used to keep the unconscious teen tied up just then, and she obviously didn’t want to leave that behind. Or maybe she was just a little worried about Dipper and how he was handling things, too, given the whole possession thing.

Stan saw when she paused for a moment at the door and glanced back at him, and he gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile, to let her know that everything was fine, that he could handle being left on the porch alone with the guy they’d summarily dragged out of the forest with them. And it must’ve worked, because she smiled back at him (not as cheerily as usual, but it was something) and walked into the Shack without a second look back.

Stan let out a breath and let his shoulders slump a bit as he looked down at the gun in his hands. It’d be better if the kids were close by Ford for this, Stan figured. Sixer was the one who’d had the most experience in dealing with Cipher up until that point; they should feel the safest staying with him.

And that had left Stan with himself, his front porch, the slowly-growing bloodstain on the floorboards, a half-finished can of Pitt Cola that probably wasn’t getting any more finished anytime soon -- darn it Ford -- and the teen, who looked more than a little worse-for-wear.

Oh, yeah. And the gun. _Darn it Ford._

Stan grumbled a bit as he dumped the gun he’d been given into the cooler that he’d been using as a footrest, and then kicked it under the couch. “Yeesh. Paranoid much, Sixer?” he complained under his breath to himself, airing his annoyance out loud. “‘If he tries anything, shoot him,’ right. What d'you expect him to do? It’s not like the dumb triangle can get through the unicorn voodoo on the Shack,” he grumbled. “You just renewed it last week,” right before the kids had come up for the summer, just in case.

Stan frowned down at the unconscious teenager that had been unceremoniously dumped on the porch of the Mystery Shack. It was pretty clear from the look of the kid, as Stan bent down over him, that he almost must’ve been possessed, _‘obviously’_ , given the state of him and what he was wearing -- no self-respecting teen would be caught dead wearing **that** getup in the middle of the woods of Oregon, or anywhere else for that matter. _Maybe_ senior prom, but even _that’d_ be pushing it; it reminded Stan of the pastor costume Dipper had had on for Mabel’s puppet show, when he’d been possessed by the demonic dorito.

He actually felt sorry for the teen. The only _serious_ idiots they ever got hanging around the Bill statue were goths and cultists, and the kid almost had to be one of the former, not the latter -- well, assuming he wasn’t one of the _un-_ serious idiots, just some dumb schmuck who’d heard about it online and come to town on a dare, anyway. “The heck, kid?” The two-tone blue-and-black hair was bad enough, but the blue-and-black tuxedo complete with bow-tie? Yikes! Not to mention those shoes. You just didn’t go woods-walking in shoes like that; that was just asking for trouble. And the black pirate-like eyepatch over the kid’s right eye? That didn’t look like a fashion statement, and Stan didn’t want to think about what Cipher might’ve done to him there. He remembered what Dipper had told him about the forks. …First-things-first, though.

Stan sighed again and knelt down to start untying the grappling hook cord that had been wrapped way too many times around the kid’s torso and upper arms. “Overkill much, Ford?” and stupid besides -- that wouldn’t’ve stopped Bill from running… and probably explained the bleeding head wound and the dirt and twigs it looked like he’d pretty much rolled in. Ford must’ve tagged him in the back of the head, because he’d definitely gone down hard.

His grandniece would want the cord back, though. Better to hand it back whole than to cut it loose. Maybe she’d only lose a little length off the end of the stuff, getting it reeled back into the gun and reattached properly.

Stan made pretty quick work of the rope, even found where they’d wrapped up the gun itself into the cord somehow -- no wonder Mabel had looked so mad, not just shaky; she’d had to leave the entire thing behind, probably felt unsafe without it -- and managed to unhook and retract the cord for her, getting it all back intact. It took him less than half a minute all-told. “Heh. Still got it.” He smiled at his accomplishment and set it to the side for her.

Then he got down to really looking over the teen. --Headwound, yep. “Really did a number on you there, huh kid,” Stan said, as he realized that it wasn’t so much a gunshot or sci-fi laser-burn wound as some other kind of wound on the back of his head. He had a bleeding gash, yeah, but… “You got a bit of a goose egg goin’ on back there,” nearly the size of his fist. “What’d you hit?” It looked less like the kid had had something thrown at him, and more like he must’ve tripped, spun, and gone down backwards, hit his head hard on “Some kinda rock or something?”, falling.

Stan sat back on his heels, thinking. He could almost see it in his mind’s eye -- Bill possessing the kid, nabbing his body and turning to run, dodging around trees, actually starting to get away with those long legs. He could see Ford firing and missing, Mabel pulling out her grappling hook and yelling something at Bill; Bill would’ve turned to yell something back at them, unable to resist taunting them -- it was what he did -- and Mabel would’ve jumped at that chance immediately. He could almost see the look of the surprise that must’ve graced the teen-Bill’s face, at Mabel shooting and _not_ missing, wrapping him up unexpectedly with the grappling hook line, the force spinning him around completely, the cord retracting, and then--

Yeah. “That must’ve hurt.” Stan winced sympathetically. Probably had had enough momentum going to keep rolling a few times for good measure, too, or maybe that had been the cord pulling him back still. If Ford or Dipper had gotten ahold of the other end of it, helped brace Mabel once she’d nabbed him… Yep. That would do it.

“Good thing the dorito likes pain,” Stan muttered. The kid, though… “I wouldn’t take any bets on that being true for anyone _not_ an insane corn chip bent on spreading world-destroying weirdness all over the place, or whatever, though.” Then Stan snorted. “Ah, geez. Now Poindexter’s got me talking like him, too, and not even on purpose! Bad enough when Dipper does it. Do me a favor and don’t ever tell him for me, okay, kid?” he grumbled out. “I’d never hear the end of it.”

Stan looked over at the kid’s face, and couldn’t help but notice that he was still out, and had been throughout his not-so-gentle manhandling in looking him over. “Ugh, you’re really not waking up anytime soon, are ya?” He kneeled down next to him completely, and finished double-checking the kid’s neck, spine, arms, and ribs. His legs seemed fine. No broken bones or anything. Nothing else seemed wrong with him, at least, other than his head and having dirt and crud all over him. “Better not have a concussion.” He frowned. “Or worse. --You’re supposed to talk to folks when they’re unconscious like that, right? Like they can hear you?” He gave the kid a half-hearted smile, that was really more of a wince. “Guess it’s good I'm good at talking to myself then, huh? I can speak enough for the both of us, until you’re up.”

Stan got his arms under the kid’s body, repositioned himself from a kneel into a crouch, got his knees bent, and lifted -- with his knees, not his back -- then had to immediately stifle a wince, and not because his back hurt either. Kind of the opposite, in fact. “Yeesh. No wonder Ford was carryin’ you around like a feather duster,” Stan said, stifling a curse as the kid’s body came up in his arms waaaay too easily. The kid was grossly underweight; Stan could lift the twins without issue, one per arm, but despite the fact that this teenager looked to be around seventeen or eighteen years old and was maybe just a little shorter than he and Ford were, this older teen couldn’t’ve weighed much more than Dipper and Mabel combined.

And Stan well knew from experience that a kid didn’t get that way in just a couple of days, or a week or two even. There was only one thing Stan knew of that could do that to a person.

Stan stood there for a moment, thinking as he looked down at the teen in his arms, then said, “Kid, you’ve really got a whole _world_ of problems goin’ on, don’t’cha.” With a grim look on his face, he bridal-carried the kid the short distance over to the wicker couch. “Here. ‘Least I can do for Ford being a jerk.” He set the kid down on the cushions, not worried about the grime or the blood -- the couch had seen worse in its time -- and grabbed the first-aid kit that was sitting next to the cooler -- he’d learned pretty quickly the previous summer to keep band-aids and stuff on-hand and close-by for the kids, given how many scrapes they’d kept getting into on a regular basis. “Let’s see...” From the well-stocked kit, he grabbed out some disinfectant wipes, cloth bandage pads, and gauze tape and set them to the side, before turning back to his impromptu patient.

Stan lifted the kid’s head slightly, to get another look at the back of it, then lowered it again carefully. The kid had definitely bled enough to clean out the wound, and was not-quite-starting to look a little pale. “Hm. Might need that too.” Stan rooted around under the couch and pulled out a box of crackers to set on the couch next to the kid -- once he woke up, the kid would need it -- then grabbed the cooler and pulled it back out a bit to sit down on top of it. “Here we go.” He lifted the kid’s head again, this time to hold the bandage to the kid’s head, and did so for a couple minutes, long enough that it should’ve stopped bleeding.

It was quiet. Nothing else came out of the woods, and with the door closed, he could almost pretend that nobody was at the Shack with him. It was almost like they were the only two people in the world. ...Kind of morbid, really. Reminded Stan a little too much of the early days at the Shack, when…

Except, with the kid there, he wasn’t really alone, was he? And the others _were_ right inside...

Stan grimaced and shook it off. “Hold still for me, willya?” He used the gauze tape to wrap up the side of the kid’s head, to keep up the pressure and hold the cloth pad on tightly, making the motions almost automatically. “Y’know, I used to have to do this a lot for Sixer when we were little. He used to get rocks thrown at him sometimes, y’know. Mostly jerks trying to knock off his glasses. Or, uh, well…” for having six fingers on each hand... “for whatever it was that week. Y’know how jerks and losers are.”

He didn’t bother to get some ice out of the cooler for the swelling; it looked like it’d be fine on its own. Didn’t seem _that_ bad.

It was only after cleaning his hands off with the wipes, and then using them to get up some of the excess blood off the floorboards, that Stan finally gave into his growing Sixer-induced paranoia. “And now I’m gonna have to check your eye out, even though I totally know better and my brother is just being completely paranoid about things. I feel stupid already even thinking that I maybe have to do this,” he complained out loud as he leaned over the kid and lifted up the lid of the kid’s undamaged left eye.

“Huh. ...Well, you’re definitely not possessed anymore, kid, so that’s something,” Stan muttered congenially towards the teenager as he let go of his eyelid, “But you’re sure in the running with Ford for weirdness.” The kid’s eye wasn’t yellow -- it was white like it was supposed to be -- but the colored part looked a bit more like a cat’s eye than round-ish. The pupil almost looked slitted vertically -- _almost_ \-- but what it really was, was only matching the shape of the somewhat-thin blue iris surrounding it. It made Stan worry about what the kid’s eye was _supposed_ to look like, if Bill had done something to him to cause that, somehow. The triangle had done a lot of stuff during Weirdmageddon when he’d had a body, _to_ his body, that shouldn’t have been possible, too. But that had been Bill’s own body, not this poor schmuck’s. Bill and his body had never been able to get past the barrier around the Shack; therefore, this poor dumb beat-up kid couldn’t be Bill.

...He didn’t quite work up the nerve to check under the eyepatch. Not like he needed to -- Ford had been pretty clear about _both_ eyes being yellow with vertical slits and no visible iris when Bill was in-charge, not just one eye -- even if Ford always checked both, ‘just for thoroughness’.

Stan sat back down on the edge of the cooler and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Sixer, you better not have just gone off on a bender over some poor kid having weird eyes.” The kid’s clothes were weird, too, but maybe they were actually something the kid had chosen to wear through a walk in the forest, as part of some sort-of stupid bet? ...Or a prank gone wrong. Yes, they got the occasional goth, or cultist or two or three, but that didn’t make up the majority of the people making their way to Gravity Falls these days to trek out and find the clearing.

People had gotten their picture with the statue before, and even shaken hands with it -- no matter how heart-attack-inducing it was for every member of his little family when it happened, especially the first time they’d thought they’d gotten to the statue too late… But. Nothing had ever come of it before. The tourists -- because that was what the picture-takers usually were -- ended up laughing their asses off at the crazy Pines family quartet, ‘oh, look at those crazy people, nearly dying from fright, being scared to death over a couple of strangers touching their dumb statue,’ and ‘why don’t they just “never mind all that!” like everybody else in town,’ and after not a very long while Stan had just gotten tired of trying to chase everybody off with a baseball bat and given up. Ford still ran patrols nightly, but somebody in town had talked somewhere, word had gotten around, and now they were a laughingstock online that apparently people just couldn’t stop trolling in real life.

Not that Stan had had too much of a heart attack to begin with, not like the rest of his family had, because apparently he was the only one of his family who’d gotten stuck with all the common sense. Bill wasn’t in his triangular body anymore; he’d left it, ended up in Stan’s own mind, and gotten himself killed. There wasn’t anything _left_ in Bill’s body to do anything to anyone, anymore, and hadn’t been for some time, and one of these days he was gonna have to yell at Ford about it, about how stupid and paranoid his brother was being, and that was gonna start another fight again, and kinda suck.

If it had just been Ford being bound and determined to stay paranoid and freak out all over nothing, then Stan wouldn’t be worried about it -- he’d just let Ford go off and do it, blow off all the steam on his own and let him work through it. Because Ford would work through it eventually. Sure, at first he’d panic, and then he’d overplan and put in place precautions than nobody sane would even contemplate ever taking, and then he’d watch and wait and watch and wait, stewing over it all more and more… until he realized how silly he was being and could finally laugh it all off--

\--but it wasn’t just Ford it was affecting anymore. The problem was what it was doing to the kids; Stan had never seen Dipper so jumpy in his life than over the past week-and-a-half -- not even during Weirdmaggedon itself -- and Mabel wasn’t much better -- not least of which because she was now second-guessing herself due to her inability to recognize Bill in disguise on multiple occasions -- and Ford was forcing the kids to relive that junk every time he panicked about people being around the statue. Stan was going to have to call him out on it, now, and soon. --Except that was a low blow that Stan didn't want to have to deal out, even if it was true, it made him sick to even think it.

...Well, it could’ve been worse. At least it helped out business at the Mystery Shack for Soos; most of the people who came around ended up going to the Mystery Shack afterwards, if only to try and corner Soos and Wendy for more “fun”. Soos took it like a champ, though, laughing over it all in his easygoing and usual genial way; Wendy ignored all the jibes cooly, as usual for her, though Stan had also noticed that she’d took to wearing her axe as part of her part-time uniform, and had his suspicions it was there to give a not-so-subtle warning to ward off the worst of the jerks. ...Or maybe it was just a teenage-girl thing. It could be fifty-fifty.

Neither Wendy or Soos were worried about it, because Stan wasn’t worried about it. And they knew him; they knew he should know, and they trusted him -- weird as that was still for him to think about -- or maybe that was the conditioning of a paycheck and asking no questions, all those years of working at the Shack. ...Eh, whatever. He’d take what he could get.

Stan sighed and leaned back to stare out at the forest, in the direction of where the stone statue was, before rubbing his fingers over his eyes. Because, honestly, he was just kidding himself here -- his brother and the kids freaking out occasionally and then mostly calming themselves down again wasn’t really the worst of it. If Ford had actually jumped some poor stupid teenager for no reason, and scared the living hell out of the kids when there wasn’t actually anything wrong that they’d seen themselves (and they wouldn’t’ve hesitated to jump in and add anything they’d seen when Ford had first said something, if they _had_ seen something)...

The kids looked up to his brother more than enough to trust what he said on principle alone.

...And under any other circumstances, Stan would’ve been thrilled that his brother and the kids had gotten themselves to that point, and that level of trust. But right now, with _this_...

“Ugh, what a _mess_ ,” stan said, running a hand through his hair. ...And Stan wasn’t exactly looking forward to whatever _discussion_ he was gonna have to have with the kid’s parents, either, whenever they finally showed up. From the state of the kid, he had a feeling it’d be the same kind of talk he’d have to give Soos’ deadbeat of a father… if the guy ever dared show his face around the Shack while Stan was still living, and in-residence, anyway.

“Well, this is just a great start to the summer, now, isn’t it, kid?” he muttered to no-one in particular, other than the trees in the woods. The poor kid was still unconscious.


End file.
